But this leads us to an even larger, and in general much more important, problem in popular scientific discourse, and our human ability to even comprehend anything at all.
The problem lies with definitions of terms and the simultaneous perception of their meaning.
I will demonstrate the problem by using a colloquial and very common term which most people should be familiar with, no matter of educational class:
“Climate Change Denier”.
This term is not offensive, for me, due to the connotations of holocaust denial – if that is really how or why the term was originally concocted,
it is clearly enough to tell you that that
someone feels very emotionally defensive about their beliefs in anthropogenic climate change.
Rather, the term is much more offensive on a fundamentally
intellectual and academic level:
1) the skeptic community of proper scientists has never denied the
existence of climate change,
2) climate change is not synonymous with human influences, a-priori,
3)climate change is well-known to have always occurred in all time-scales and periods that humans have data for,
4) the only thing that one can actually deny about the climate is that it would be changing right now without human influence.
The abuse and insult to logic by users of this term
should be enough for any rational person to dismiss their claims out of hand, with no further justification necessary.
A person simply cannot be a competent thinker and use this term with
intention; nor could one have competent scientific values or principles in using this term while knowing what fraud it is.